I was reading this, and got to thinking: http://rare.us/story/why-millennials-are-afraid-of-scary-ideas/

1. True Liberalism requires adults, which requires individuation/separation from the  womb.  Fascism in some form–and understood broadly I would incorporate monarchism under this banner/ceremonial ax–can be the only creed for a society whose members consistently fail to individuate. I would note that most of human history has seen tradition imposed by violence at every level from the home to the State.  To this very day, if an Untouchable walks in an upper class Indian neighborhood, he is liable to be killed, and no police report ever filed, much less the crime punished.  This is a society which does not value individualism, or rising above your operant conditioning.  Most societies are like that.

I wonder from time to time what exactly Bill Ayers taught. He wrote a number of texts (in addition to Obama’s two books) which I have long intended to look up, but there is only so much time in the day.  Child Development was his field, if memory serves.  One could scarcely do better, in building his version of 1984, than to generalize the parenting practices on display here.

2. As a general rule, parents who raise children who fail to individuate have not done so themselves.  The parents of these perma-children are co-dependent.  They need to keep their children sucking at the proverbial teat so that they themselves can avoid the pain and confusion which would attend the recognition of their long term failure.  For children to individuate, they must be pushed away by the parents to some extent.  They must be told to take risks, and to risk failure regularly.

3. No good parent should wish only good things for their children.  All of us need challenges to grow, and unplanned challenges do the most in forcing us to become more resilient, adaptable, and ALIVE.  You build emotional muscle in the using of it. Hoping for an easy slide through life is the equivalent of encouraging them to avoid any physical exercise at all, because it requires effort.  It is a hope for their failure.  It is the opposite of love.

4. Only people who have individuated can even begin to think about spirituality.  The path one needs to walk shifts constantly, and no one can tell you where to go and what to do, reliably. No one can guide you on a path you are inventing as you go along.  You have to learn to trust yourself, your own instincts, and to go where no one you know has gone before.  Certainly, there are good tools, and some good teachers, but in the end we all are responsible for ourselves.

5. I think we could perhaps speak of Male Fascisms and Female Fascisms. Male Fascism is arresting and jailing or killing anyone who dissents.  It is Communism.  It is Nazism.

Female Fascism, like women themselves, would be more subtle.  Think about what would happen if these women got complete power.  Would they be crucifying people in the streets, shooting dissidents in the head?  No.  I don’t think so.  What they would do would be to ostracize people who failed to goose-step with them.  They would limit where you could live, and where you could shop.  They would limit where you could work, and who you could marry.  You would have no access to the internet, or physical access to a public place where you might say something inconvenient.  You would be, for all intents and purposes, removed from society, but not directly.

And even though this process would be based on the very same hatred, the very same cruelty as Male Fascism, they would be able, in their discussion groups where they debated how best to “care” for society, to consider these merely unpleasant but absolutely necessary precautions to prevent unpleasantness that might ruin someone (else’s) day.

It would, in other words, be based upon the same grandiosity and self delusion which guide all left wing lunatics.

I got to thinking about that dream I had back in 2012: the ritual decapitation of leftists.

When the head is gone, what is left?  The gut.  You have a being which is pure instinct, which feels rage and hate and violence and all the other nasty emotions with no governing control, no conscience, no restraints.

If those energies had been stagnant, this is liberating.  It feels like freedom.  You can finally express a rage which was bottled up in hesitancy, which you could not justify rationally.

One of the major problems with soft rich white people–who are the main demographic contributing to leftist politics–is that they do not allow themselves to believe anything.  You can’t be truly Christian–not if it means judging gays.  You can’t be proudly American. You can’t be proudly male.  You can’t value success in a conventional way.  Virtually every pathway for expressing creative energy which is sometimes tinged with anger and violence–these are normal human emotions, felt by all–is blocked.

So the solution is to stop thinking, and start reacting.  If you like, you can paper it over with a stance of ironic detachment: detachment from the actual constructive use of reason.

You become an anger machine, one absolutely resistant to the persuasive efforts of anyone who may disagree with your politics based upon the blatant and ineluctable fact that the chosen methods never lead to the purported ends.  Never.

One of the paradoxes of Identity politics is that they reduce identities; they do not increase them.  If you are fortunate enough to be one of the “protected” groups, you still are only defining yourself as a non-white male.  I would argue that the principle problem in black communities is precisely a lack of identity, of a sense of self.

You create an authentic self through making decisions based on principles you have chosen to value, particularly when these decisions are sometimes difficult.  That is how you define who you are, what sort of person you are.  That is how you build authentic self respect.  There is no other way.  There is no other way.

The essence of Identity politics is division: it is trying to strengthen one group POLITICALLY by attacking another group, typically rich white males. IF ONLY Republicans did not exist, IF ONLY the Man didn’t have it in for them, IF ONLY manna was not prevented from falling from the sky by those evil corporations, all would be right with the world.

But of course this is bullshit, or at least largely bullshit.  Anyone who is given a free education and fails to make use of it is stupid.  Anyone who does not have a plan to improve their own life, or at least that of their children, is irresponsible and stupid, at least if they don’t like the quality of their life.

You do not build people up by making excuses for them, by giving them reasons not to do work only they can do.  This is obvious wisdom, and will never change, no matter how technologically sophisticated we become, or how wealthy.

When I say Identity politics work only politically, I mean that.  They work to get cynics elected, and to make them rich.  The lot of actual, individual people is impoverished: morally, culturally, socially, and economically.

I have been to Baltimore.  Driving downtown, you pass block after block of ghetto, to finally arrive in a nice, gentrified, white, downtown.  It would appear the whites live in the suburbs, come downtown for ball games or concerts, then go back home.  This leaves thousands of unemployed blacks sitting on their porches every day watching the world go by.  You do nothing long enough, it kills your soul.  It is depressing.

But I will return to the fact that two parent black families fare just as well as two parent white families, at least when it comes to raising children.

All of the efforts of Democrats to help them have made their lives horrible.  Only headless people would continue to believe the lies.

Virtually everything that gets called “spirituality” is in my view bullshit.  I spent a lot of time in that domain in my early twenties, and it was and remains my perception that the vast bulk of the money and time involved in this huge industry is spent on vanity, self-aggrandizement, and even oneupsmanship.  In that domain, you are often surrounded by flakes and emotionally superficial people.  I understand the cynics fully.  Both the words love and spirituality are vaguely traumatizing for me, after having endured their abuse for so long.

But I have to say I have reached a point in my personal development where I am beginning to open up to my Kum Nye practice, and have realized that true spirituality literally is about the pursuit of new emotions.  I remember the first time I heard Annie Lennox sing about that, and wondered how a new emotion could be possible.  After all, haven’t we all felt everything?

No, no we haven’t.  I literally feel I am exploring new facets of myself, undiscovered caves and tunnels, which are filled with riches I didn’t suspect were there.  It is exciting.

Here is a nice quote from “The Joy of Being” by Tarthang Tulku:

There is beauty that you have not yet seen.  There is sound that carries consciousness into heavenly spheres.  There is fragrance more exquisite than the rarest incense.  There is joy that expands beyond ecstacy and dissolves the seeds of suffering.  You deserve to experience all these treasures and manifest their significance to all humanity.

I know it’s a bit cliched to return again to that mountain of wisdom, Die Hard, but if you will bear with me, I think some nuggets remain unexposed. It is such a richly textured film.

Alan Rickman and his Germans have detailed plans to get through every layer of the safe, until the last one.  They work and work and work, and then are stopped.  Then the FBI cuts power, and the last layer opens itself.

It is my personal belief that a daily or at least regular spiritual practice of some sort is very useful and important.  But I think sometimes playing hooky can actually be enormously beneficial.  I said this a few posts ago.

Sometimes doing nothing is what you need.  And I don’t mean self consciously “doing nothing”.  I mean: hey look, a SQUIRREL!!!  I think I need chicken and waffles today.  I wonder if they have Seinfeld reruns on Netflix.  My dog needs a belly rub. My goodness, what a pretty day!!!

In any event, this is what I personally need sometimes.  And I did have chicken and waffles today.  Very tasty: salty and sweet.  Now I’m going to listen to Green Onions.

The only way to take life seriously is to laugh at it sometimes.

You hear that?  It’s laughing too.  The airs of this world have many blossoms and many terrors, but it is all interesting.

I was thinking today about the pervasiveness of what I would call Tubaforms in the “interpretation” of literature.  You have Freudian psychosexual analyses: Henry David Thoreau had an unresolved Oedipal Complex.  You have class analysis: the construction of sexual and class identity in the works of Dead White Male (or female exhibiting False Consciousness–since we know what true consciousness is).

In my view, what every human being on the planet needs is love.  They need to be able to receive it without guilt or holding back, and they need to be able to give it in the same way.  This is a very, very simple tubaform, but one which concords better than ANY other of which I am aware with the plainly observable needs we all have.

In breaking down “class” for example, what is the end game?  Is it human felicity?  Given that such narratives invariably depend upon hate and destruction, how could any sane person expect anything good?  Mack the Knife is a left wing hero. I mean that literally.  Look it up.

I look at these simplistic analyses, and it occurs to me they are mechanistic.  Thoreau was not someone whose mother failed to give him authentic permission to individuate as a man.  No: both were embroiled in an occulted biochemical mechanical process which occasionally creates incomplete reactions.

I get why people would want to dream of utopias; but as I said the other day, you do not create a utopia based solely on what you do not want.  In point of fact, that process is utterly lacking in intelligence and purpose, and no one who fails to purpose anything can claim to be working FOR anything.  They are lost in a house of mirrors.  That many are lost with them changes the basic situation not one iota.

In the same sense that curiosity is the neurological opposite of trauma, I would argue that fear is the opposite of playfulness, and that playfulness is necessary for creativity.  Play is unstructured, spontaneous, fun.  It calls on creative instincts intrinsically.   This makes it something which interacts with existing paradigms in interesting and unexpected ways.

True spirituality, in my view, is playful.  It is happy.  It is free.

This is obscured by the fact that religion–which is the devolution of usually honest spiritual awakenings to structures of power based upon codified and rigid ideas–relies on fear for compliance.  Sin and you will go to hell.  Sin, and we will SEND you to hell.

And I don’t think it is true that play has NO rules.  Different dances have different names.  I simply think that it calls forth an open flow of energies of the sort that need to flow for any of us to interact directly with Life, and to look forward to, to cherish, the prospect.

People who despair, are those who cannot imagine playing in a world filled with cruelty and destruction.  Ah, it is all sound and fury, and behind the curtain there is nothing to fear.

Here is one of my favorite poems, which I have likely posted at some point:

BY RABINDRANATH TAGORE

In the same sense that arrogance is a mistake in the future, as Edward de Bono put it, I would argue so too is fear.

In general, fear constricts our perceptual field, and colors what we see and hear and think.  It can in some cases facilitate perception, as Gavin de Becker argues in “The Gift of Fear”, but ambient, decontextualized, non-threat specific fear does the opposite.  It makes you stupider.

And I was pondering that I was raised to equate religion with fear: good Christians fear Hell.  It is eternal, and once there, you can’t get out.  This is self evidently something to be concerned about.  I am a theist, obviously, but I can understand Ricky Gervais, I think it was, when he quipped that God loved us so much he created heaven for us, and that he created hell just in case we didn’t love him back enough.  This is roughly the ideology of this version of religion, one which is even worse in Islam.

I think it possible to stipulate that no authentic spirituality can be built on persisting fear.  If fear is everywhere, you are dealing with a sociopsychological illness that has nothing to do with God.

I read this piece by Terry Eagleton: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Slow-Death-of-the/228991/ and got to thinking.

I look at blueprints all the time, and I have never seen one, ever, which specified in detail what it DIDN’T want: no use of structural steel, not too many doors, no red paint, no blue in the carpet.

Eagleton, as some may know, is a Marx-biased fascist, and thus when he bemoans the lack of critical studies, what he is really complaining about is insufficient government funding for incompetent dilettantes to occupy all their time taking strong stands on issues–like economics–they really don’t understand. If English teachers confined themselves to teaching English literature, that may be one thing, but he himself invokes Foucault, and implicitly many others, going back to Plato through Marx.  This has nothing to do with English, and everything to do with cultural subversion through English.  One could even argue that most English professors in fact view their own field–the underlying assumption that English, per se, is worth studying–with contempt, outside of the aesthetic merits they take in well crafted prose, which is not different in its nature or ultimate usefulness from the same appreciation applied to fine wine.

Personally, I took advantage of state underwritten education, majored in the humanities, and STILL have learned vastly more since I graduated than I ever did in college.  As I have likely mentioned, I often listen to Teaching Company lecture series.

To return to the topic, though, Marx was a critic.  He was not an architect.

Let us think as architects, though.

We want a political system which allows groups of differing visions of life to resolve their differences peacefully.

We want a society which values creativity, expressed both in the artistic domain, as well as the economic domain.

We want a society which protects individual rights, both in the freedom from (the violence of others or the government) and freedom to (to do anything which harms no one) senses.

We want a high general standard of living, and a close correspondence between an individuals willingness to work hard, and their following income.  We want to be free of those who can take from others without contributing anything.  We want all wealth to be earned, at some point. (it is worth noting that Oxbridge could easily be seen as having been purchased on the backs of peasants; and attended in large measure by the descendants of successful thieves).

We want everyone to be equal before the law.

These are a few desiderata.  None of these are valued in Communo-fascist regimes.  In all such states, violence of the government against the people is the norm; oligarchs earn rich livings at the expense of the populace as a whole; creativity is only valued when it enriches the elite; and diversity of opinion is squelched.  This is the condition in Cuba.  It is the condition in North Korea.  It is the condition in China, which in my understanding STILL operates labor camps of the sort Hitler used.

The way that imbeciles like Eagleton rationalize their bad ideas is–and I’m going to guess, talking out loud here:

1) They are divorced from consequence.  He does not think a Communist coup is likely, so he will not have to explain to the suffering masses why he supported it.

2) They surround themselves with the ideologically like-minded, making their horrific ideas, filled with death as they are, seem palatable.

3) Being divorced from consequence, they are divorced from the necessity of planning.  It is one the ironies of this whole thing that those who most value central planning are themselves incapable of planning at all.  They aren’t interested in it.  It comes dressed in overalls and looks like work, and even though he pokes fun at himself, it seems likely Eagleton really is as effete as he appears.  He is not going to take on the cares of someone concerned with making important things happen correctly and harmoniously.

Marx himself, in my understanding–I have his biography on my shelf, but like many other such books, have not made the time to read it–was a slob.  He didn’t work regularly or at all.  Like Rousseau, he was a chronic debtor, and unreliable in nearly everything.

I do not think it would be taking things too far to view the entirety of his economic and philosophical views as extended rationalizations of his personal failings.  When you fuck up, what is the first thing you do, if you are intelligent?  You do abstract.  This is a great way to avoid emotions that are unpleasant.  You fuck up a lot, and you spend all your life thinking.  Once you are thinking, what do you think about?  Why it ISN’T YOUR FAULT.  Make it large enough and complicated enough, and nobody will see that you felt unloved at age 3.

The world runs on ideas.  If you feed it bad ideas, it gets ugly.  Feed it good ideas, it brightens up.  Eagleton is complaining that his campaign to paint England grey (and call it a rainbow) is underfunded.  To that, I say: marvelous.

There is nothing beautiful about war, and the only beautiful thing about warriors is they don’t quit.  That is it.  A true warrior is mean, constantly vigilant, and has sacrificed some part of his or her life to the protection of their community.  They have learned to live with horror, and if they learn to love battle, it is only because that is the only place where their inner hatred can meet an outer reality that makes sense.

I get in touch with my inner warrior sometimes, and he is a very strong, very capable self that is angry, calculating, and covered head to toe with battle scars.  He should be dead, but he wasn’t ready.

But all warriors know their destiny is to die, and so is the destiny of everyone around them.  Nothing lasts.  You cannot depend, ultimately, on anyone but yourself.  Everything else will be cut away, and so one day will you be, too.

We idealize warriors, I think, because our culture has become much too effeminate, having cast aside masculine virtues like risk-taking, valuing physical privation and difficulty, and seeking out difficult challenges.  These are all to the good.  These are needed and good virtues.  But they are not war.  War is learning to kill our fellow men (and women: do not forget that the bombs we drop do not discriminate) effectively.  It is learning to suppress normal human impulses of empathy, connection, and revulsion at the thought of violence.

As a friend of mine once put it, who had seen enough of it, “war is as romantic as a meat grinder.”

I have PTSD and spent last night being reminded of it nearly hourly.

I do have a battle plan, though, to deal with it, and I am executing it.

Can we not call the Democrats the party of political codependence?

I offer from time to time the analogy of these 800 pound people we read about every so often–the story has become less interesting, having been told many times–who are confined to their beds.  No one who cannot get out of bed survives alone, and the person who facilitates this–their co-conspirator in their own effective avoidance of life–is criminal.  They are depriving someone of a life; and of a responsibility which, alone, can buy them true happiness.